June 26, 2018 Arts & Culture How to Write a Feminist “Dead Girl” Story By Emma Copley Eisenberg John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1952. This past Sunday, the governor of Virginia quietly signed into law Senate Bill 565, which adds misdemeanor assault and battery as well as criminal trespass to the list of offenses for which, if convicted, the perpetrator must give a sample of their blood or saliva to be retained in a statewide DNA database until the end of time. In common parlance, this bill is known for Hannah Graham, the white University of Virginia sophomore whose body was recovered in a creek bed outside Charlottesville. The preceding nonstop thirty-six-day search was the most expensive Virginia search effort to date. Hannah Graham’s parents were the chief advocates for SB 565. Her mother pleaded to the Justice Committee, “Please don’t let what happened to my beautiful daughter, Hannah, happen to another young woman in Virginia.” While SB 565 may indeed have prevented Graham’s death (her killer turned out to have a long history of violence against women and a prior conviction for criminal trespass), critics worry about its potential to sow more injustice. In a statement, the Virginia ACLU wrote, “It actually is a creeping assault on Virginians’ privacy and due-process rights that could lead to more bias in the state’s criminal-justice system—and even false convictions.” Read More
June 25, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, Foremost God in the Harvard College Pantheon By Louis Begley Donald Hall in Scytheville, New Hampshire. Photo: Henri Cole. Don Hall is dead after a brief struggle with a horrid and untreatable cancer. It was impossible not to wish for his prompt release from this misery. All the same, I can’t really believe that he is gone, that the letters we exchanged once, sometimes twice a week will never again be written, that I will never again be astonished by his flashes of humor, his unending devotion to his writer’s craft, his delight in simple pleasures. Never again the outings with his wonderful companion Linda Kunhardt to the Italian restaurant where he especially liked the strong-flavored food and into which she could, in his telling, maneuver his wheelchair without difficulty. He liked to eat until the very end, not only whatever pasta that restaurant served but also onion sandwiches he fixed himself, a delicacy the mere mention of which made me cringe. A pâté de campagne that he ate at the Lipp, in Paris, about twenty years ago, with my wife and Linda and I, was present in his memory and in his letters. All of this is gone. But Gus (his dog), the blue chair, the Glenwood stove, the changing moods of Eagle Pond and Mount Kearsarge, and the rest of the Donald Hall iconography live on, in memory and in his verse. Read More
June 25, 2018 At Work Hero’s Journey: An Interview with Taylor Mac By Garth Greenwell Taylor Mac in act 7 of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn, 2016. Photo: Teddy Wolff. In October 2016, at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, the theater artist Taylor Mac performed A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in its entirety for the first and only time. The show, which Mac had been developing since 2012, retells American history through its popular music, spending an hour on each decade, beginning in 1776 and ending in 2016. The New York Times music critic Wesley Morris wrote that the twenty-four-hour performance—which featured a glow-in-the-dark production of The Mikado, visionary costumes by Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle, and a large penis-shaped balloon—was “one of the great experiences of my life.” In 2017, the work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, and Mac received a MacArthur Fellowship. The University of Iowa’s Hancher Auditorium commissioned the 1864-to-1856 decade of A 24-Decade History, and in April 2018, Mac performed an abridged version of the work in Iowa City. Two days before the performance, I interviewed Mac at Hancher’s Strauss Hall for the Creative Matters Lecture Series. The exchange below is an edited version of that discussion, with thanks to the University of Iowa. INTERVIEWER I want to start with a personal story. Taylor and I just met for the first time, but we have some friends in common, one of them being my best friend and really the center of my queer family for twenty years. He was at the epic twenty-four-hour performance of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music in New York in October 2016. It was an experience that changed his life. At one point in A 24-Decade History, there’s a horrifyingly homophobic Ted Nugent song about fag bashing, which Taylor turns into a slow dance at a junior-high queer prom. Taylor asked everyone in the audience to dance with a same-sex partner they didn’t know. My friend danced with a good-looking guy sitting in his row, and he said it was the most extraordinary experience. At first, everyone was giggling, and Taylor was quite severe with them and made them stop and said, No, take it seriously. And my friend said that over the course of this dance, he felt something profound happen between him and this other man, something that felt real to him. Over the next six months, he left his partner of thirteen years, he found this man, discovered that, in fact, something profound had happened between them, and last week they moved in together. So my first question is, Taylor, does this happen often? And, since I think the answer to that is going to be some species of yes, is it part of the design? MAC Well, I don’t set out to break people up. My job as a theater artist is to remind people of the things they’ve forgotten, dismissed, or buried, or that other people have buried for them. It sounds like your friend came to the show having some problems with his boyfriend and our show unearthed things in him, and then he was able to grapple with that truth about himself. If I can do that for people, that’s a real joy because I don’t believe that he’d be served staying with his former lover and not loving him. Nor do I think the former lover would be served by that. So no, it isn’t the first time. There are babies who are alive right now because of people who met at our shows. Read More
June 25, 2018 In Memoriam Donald Hall, Who Gave His Life to Work and Eros By Henri Cole Donald Hall in 2014. Photo: Henri Cole. He worked hard and now can rest. He was one of America’s best-loved poets and won all the literary awards. At eighty-six, he had his first New York Times best seller, with Essays After Eighty, celebrating the indignities of growing old. I once gave him a terrible review, and we didn’t speak for years. “I know I was pissed at you for ten or twelve years,” he wrote. “I take it back. You are good.” He was a judge for the Pulitzer the year I was a finalist. We became friends. He wrote dozens of books: poetry, short stories, children’s books, criticism, and textbooks. He was devoted to the art and craft of writing, and his discipline was an example to others. He seemed to give his life over to work and Eros. He was also very funny and very particular (“I love chicken salad, egg salad as long as it has onion, turkey and salami. I don’t like tuna”). The horrors of antiquity—a “black fatigue,” congestive heart failure, “a hundred and fifty colonoscopies,” walking more slowly with his “rollator,” falling down, the loss of words—did not exclude joy and love. Read More
June 22, 2018 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Creek Boyz, Mechanical Chickens, and Trash Heaps By The Paris Review Jorja Smith’s debut full-length, Lost and Found, has taken up residence in my mind since its release last week. Between tracks, the twenty-one-year-old R & B singer wrestles with her self-worth (on “Tomorrow”: “The hardest thing I have learned is I can’t help myself / If I can’t trust my worth / Then I can’t trust my words”) and with the gaze of the UK police state (on “Blue Lights”: “I wanna turn those blue lights into strobe lights / Not blue flashing lights, maybe fairy lights”). Being young in the summer is difficult, but it’s easier when you have someone else living through it alongside you. Last year, there was SZA’s gentle Ctrl; this year, Jorja Smith takes on her demons with a jazzier vibe, more melancholy than anxious, and very, very matter-of-fact—almost like a diary entry. —Eleanor Pritchett On October 25, 1977, Roland Barthes lost his mother, Henriette Barthes. The next day, he began a “mourning diary,” writing each entry on a slip made from typewriter paper cut into quarters. He maintained the diary until September 15, 1979—a little under two years. Five months after this final entry, Barthes was hit by a laundry truck while crossing the road. He deteriorated in the hospital for a month before succumbing to his injuries. In the foreword to the English translation, we learn that Mourning Diary is “not a book completed by its author, but a hypothesis of a book desired by him.” This is borne out in the tangled reading of observations that range from the philosophically speculative to the quotidian. His suffering repeats, swells, and subsides, seemingly without design or reason: “What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.” At times, our participation in that mourning feels like an invasion—these notes were not intended for publication in their current form—and if anyone were to tell me they read this book for purely high-minded reasons, I would distrust them. But past the rubbernecking is something more significant, for here is grief at work on a brilliant mind. The result is disordered, clumsy, and at times prosaic. It also has the virtue of being true. —Robin Jones Read More
June 22, 2018 On Film Witches, Artists, and Pandemonium in Hereditary By Dorothea Lasky Still from Hereditary. I had been sitting in a lovesick fog, waiting to see Ari Aster’s Hereditary, ever since I first heard about it. I don’t usually follow new movie releases too closely, but I found out about the movie back in January, when people at the Sundance Film Festival lost their minds about how good it was. As soon as I saw the words The Exorcist and The Shining attached to the film’s publicity materials, I knew I had to see it. I spent six agonizing months memorizing its trailers, watching YouTube fan movies (and considering making my own), talking to my friends about it until they began rolling their eyes, and dreaming about its possible endings. I fell madly in love with the idea of what it could be and what it might do to my imagination. For a poet, this is a movie’s greatest gift. The film came out on June 8, and I’ve already seen it twice. The first time, I saw it only through my fingers. I kept my hands plastered on my face, trying to avoid any jump scares (something I wish I had done when I first saw The Shining nearly twenty years ago and the ghost of room 237 began her lifelong emblazonment on my psyche). The second time, I wrote notes in a green notebook in the dark, scribbling half-words that I can barely read now. It reminded me of the way I first started writing poems in the darkness of my bedroom when I was a little girl. Read More